Political Polarization on Twitter

“For agreement between the 'left' and 'right' categories we report κ = 0.80 and κ = 0.82 respectively, both of which fall in the " nearly perfect agreement " range (Landis and Koch 1977).”

“Modularity (Newman and Girvan 2004) resulting from the cluster assignments offers a first measure of segregation , and reinforces the qualitative finding above.”

“Figure 1 shows the retweet and mention networks, laid out using a force-directed layout algorithm (Fruchterman and Reingold 1991), with node colors determined by the assigned communities.”

“To improve its effectiveness and stability , we seeded the algorithm with initial node labels determined by the leading-eigenvector modularity maximization method for two clusters (Newman 2006).”

“Label propagation (Raghavan, Albert, and Kumara 2007) works by assigning an initial arbitrary cluster membership to each node and then iteratively updating each node's label according to the label that is shared by most of its neighbors.”

“Social media play an important role in shaping political discourse in the U.S. and around the world (Bennett 2003; Benkler 2006; Sunstein 2007; Farrell and Drezner 2008; Aday et al. 2010; Tumasjan et al. 2010; O'Connor et al. 2010).”

“Retweets act as a form of endorsement, allowing individuals to rebroadcast content generated by other users, thereby raising the content's visibility (boyd, Golder, and Lotan 2008).”

“As pointed out by [7], the mention function (@) in social network, often plays a role to connect users having different or even opposed opinions and behaviors, which results in the poor homophily phenomenon in mention network and low inference performance consequently.”

“…ausgeprägte Fragmentierung des politischen Diskurses entlang politischer Ideologien feststellen (unter vielen Studien z.B.: Barberá et al. 2015; Conover et al. 2011; Lietz et al. 2014; Vaccari et al. 2016), jedoch variieren die Ergebnisse stark in Abhängigkeit vom Thema (politisch vs.…”

“Twitter users, in particular, have frequently been analyzed using the content of their microblogs (Rao et al. 2010; Pennacchiotti and Popescu 2011; Conover et al. 2011; Burger, Henderson, and Zarrella 2011; Rao and Yarowsky 2010; Zamal, Liu, and Ruths 2012).”

“…in natural language promotes the understanding of people’s thought as the intelligence of many intention-understanding-related applications, such as market opinion analysis [17], [18], [19], public opinion analysis [20], [21], [22], [23], and mental health diagnosis [24], [25], [26], [27], [28].”

“While there is debate about the impact of these effects, researchers have argued that they promote polarization (Conover et al., 2011; Sunstein and Sunstein, 2018; Chitra and Musco, 2020), harm knowledge (Holone, 2016), and lead to worryingly uniform information streams (Sunstein and Sunstein,…”

“However, the degree of fragmentation may vary across the nature of network ties and time (Conover et al., 2011).”

“Political polarization can also be inferred by analyzing clusters of retweets/mentions of tweets from users (Conover et al. 2011) or by models analyzing a set of features extracted from the tweets (PreoţiucPietro et al. 2017).”

“As social media become major channels for the diffusion of news and information, they are also increasingly attractive and targeted for abuse and manipulation [2, 3].”

“It is a standard practice to measure the degree of antagonism between communities through separation metrics such as modularity, considering that the more separated the communities are, the higher their level of antagonism and controversy (Adamic and Glance 2005; Conover et al. 2011).”

“The assignment follows the traditional assumption of studying user retweeting behavior, that when a user retweets a tweet, we assume he endorses the tweet content (Boyd, Golder, and Lotan 2010; Conover et al. 2011; Welch et al. 2011; Calais Guerra et al. ).”

“…models are clearly in line with the goals of both computational advertising (Wortman, 2008) and the growing area of computational social science (Conover et al., 2011; Nguyen et al., 2011; Paul and Dredze, 2011; Pennacchiotti and Popescu, 2011; Moham-mad et al., 2013) where big data and…”

“s [11{ 17], epidemiological surveillance and monitoring of health behaviors [18{24], contagion and online content propagation [25,26], identication of extremist groups [27], ideological polarization [8,28,29], and much more. Indeed, the combination of signicance for public discourse, data accessibility, and amenabilit…”

“(1) Hashtags in user profile: We adapt an approach from previous work (Conover et al. 2011) to bootstrap politically polarized hashtags in user profiles.”

“In their formative study of political polarization, Conover et al. (2011) explain homophily on social media through partisan user behavior in the United States.”

“…media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, where politically-active users generally tend to connect with and consume content from sources that align with their political views (Bakshy, Messing, and Adamic 2015; Conover et al. 2011; Cossard et al. 2020; Garimella et al. 2021; Cinelli et al. 2021).”

“Fortunately, access to online forums and social media platforms has helped facilitate some big-data-driven empirical research, for example, studies confirming relationships between network modularity and opinion polarisation [28].”

“[6, 15]) and other studies that have not found them on Facebook (see e.”

“In order to measure how strongly these phenomena manifest themselves on social media, a significant body of work has emerged that focuses on measures for characterizing polarization [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12].”

“For political sides, tracking the information epidemics in the social media identified the political discussions community (Guerrero-Solé, 2017), and the political polarization on Twitter (Conover et al., 2011).”

“RT network clustering detects users with similar stances by applying network clustering to an RT network (Conover et al., 2011, Fortunato, 2010).”

“re ecting how strongly they are associated with the SUPP and OPP groups. These bins are: strong SUPP, SUPP, Neutral, OPP, and strong OPP. To perform the bucketing, we used the so-called valence score [2], which is computed for an element e as follows: Quantifying Polarization on Twitter 9 (a) FD using R (b) UMAP using…”

“…(Dixit and Weibull, 2007), and its empirical scope and potential causes have been the focus of impressive studies by information scientists (Conover et al., 2011), and computational social scientists (Bail et al., 2018), but it’s implications for rational choice voting models and candidate…”

“Most works on the subject examine the connectivity among users (through followings, replies, and retweets) to investigate the extent to which networks are segregated 3,29 .”

“Some efforts [6, 10, 5] have been made to address the problem of predicting the political preference/orientation of Twitter users in recent years.”

“‘Town hall’ meetings in the USA serve a similar purpose.”

“In our model, the opinions are not distributed uniformly at random, but each user’s opinion is correlated with their neighbors’ opinions, as homophily is a well-documented property of online social networks [22].”

“These participatory websites encouraged greater homophilic clustering (Adamic & Natalie, 2005; Conover et al., 2011; Hargittai et al., 2008; Sunstein, 2001) with disaffected, grievance-driven men connecting with like-minded individuals, reinforcing their views about male subjugation, and allowing…”

“Finally, Cinelli et al. [15] compared the presence of echo chambers around several controversial topics across four social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Gab), highlighting that Facebook shows higher segregation of news consumption than Reddit.”

“SVMs + ValenceList To reduce errors made by the SVM, we calculated valence score (Conover et al., 2011) for all Arabic words.”

“members in the context of article discussions does not indicate the same polarization that has been observed in other contexts [1,8,9].”

“Previous studies have shown that the US elections polarize Internet, where both Twitter [3] and blogs [4] manifest a high political polarization.”

“…into like-minded subgroups with little linkage between each other (Adamic and Glance 2005; Aragón et al. 2013; Barbera 2015; Colleoni et al. 2014; Conover et al. 2011, 2012; Feller et al. 2021; Gaines and Mondak 2009; Garcia et al. 2015; Gruzd and Roy 2014; Hal-berstam and Knight 2014; Hargittai…”

“Our findings are in line with some of the existing studies Conover et al. (2011); Del Valle and Bravo (2018); Himelboim et al.”

“Here, we have provided a brief description of some interaction layers, but future works could explore their joint topology, temporal dynamics [33, 34], as well as other structures such as mentions networks [35] and higher-order topologies [26, 36].”

“…that political discussions in online world occur within highly polarized communities of users sharing similar political leanings or ideologies, with relatively little exchange of information between commu- nities (Adamic and Glance 2005; Conover et al. 2011b; Weber, Garimella, and Batayneh 2013).”

“Our work also relates to that of Conover et al. (2011), who studied controversy in political communication about congressional midterm elections using Twitter data .”

“Conover et al. [18] extended previous research to social media.”

“To estimate the ideology of social media users, studies have relied on fol-lower relationships 36 , mention and retweet interactions 37,38 , and URL sharing 16,39 – 41 .”

“, 2010), activism and political participation (Budak & Watts, 2015; Conover et al., 2011; González-Bailón & Wang, 2016; Hemphill & SchöpkeGonzalez, 2020), and spreading of (mis)information (Bakshy et al.”

“A social network is suitable for polarization analysis with the methods described here if the link between two nodes indicates a positive relationship, such as friendship, preference similarity, endorsement, or agreement [2, 14, 30, 32].”

“Also, we reviewworks on retweet analysis since retweet is the most common action that generates content propagation inmicroblogging sites.”

“For example, many papers study controversy in very controlled case studies, or focus on a predefined topic, most typically politics (Conover et al. 2011), for which they employ auxiliary domain-specific sources and datasets.”

“…analysis on Facebook to Pages and Groups, which form for more specific reasons, González-Bailón et al. (2023) find stronger evidence of political segregation in information consumption — consistent with other work finding evidence of political homophily on social media (Conover et al. 2021; 2012).”

“was given by Conover et al. (2011) who studied the Twitter network during the 2010 US congressional midterm elections.”

“Recent studies on Facebook (Bakshy, Messing, and Adamic 2015) and Twitter (Conover et al. 2011) have revealed polarization in the consumption and distribution of political news on social media sites.”

“Some of this work has leveraged hashtags to find relevant information on Twitter (Conover et al. 2011; Burnap et al. 2014; Giglietto et al. 2015; Letierce et al. 2010; Vieweg et al. 2010).”

“The labels of the communities found through the community detection are then propagated in the retweet network: in fact, it is an old result that Twitter users endorse content created by others much more with retweets than with mentions [14–16].”

“Among many attempts to harness the potential of online social media, a prominent one is to mine the opinions and sentiments of the public for a variety of purposes, either academic or commercial [3–6].”

“…where people are more likely to connect with those who share similar backgrounds (Aiello et al., 2012), discuss similar topics (Faralli et al., 2015; Himelboim et al., 2017; Kang & Lerman, 2012), and have similar values and beliefs (Conover et al., 2011; De Choudhury, 2011; Rathje et al., 2022).”

“These studies unravel the emergent patterns in our collective behavior and show how they can be used to gain insight about relevant social topics like economy [2], marketing [3], politics [4, 5], mobility [6], or polarization [7, 8].”

“Following the literature [12,15], we resorted to retweets in order to analyze accounts and their interactions according to their possible political orientation.”

“…highly competitive economy of attention and the fragmentation of audiences driven by networked curation of content and selective exposure (Barberá & Zeitzoff, 2017; Conover et al., 2011; Garrett, 2009; Hall et al., 2020; Klinger & Svensson, 2015; Meraz & Papacha-rissi, 2013; Williams et al., 2015).”

“For instance, one can make the objective function be the mean (or negative mean) if one wants to shift the opinions up (or down).”

“The growing popularity of Reddit has attracted research attention to predict and model controversy on its platform (Conover et al. 2011).”

“Studies have investigated a wide range of phenomena including political polarization (Adamic and Glance 2005; Conover et al. 2011; Himelboim, McCreery, and Smith 2013; Weber, Garimella, and Batayneh 2013; Garcia et al. 2015; Garimella et al. 2018; Morales et al. 2019), ideological radicalization (Grover and Mark 2019;…”

“…2023a, Louf et al. 2023b), sampling data by topically relevant keywords or hashtags (Chen et al. 2021; Demszky et al. 2019; Oakey et al. 2022), categorizing user-generated content (Fraxanet et al. 2023) or clustering networks built from retweeting/reposting or follower data (Conover et al. 2011).”

“, we note that since the dataset of traits is large, and encompasses a broad set of categories (climate, geology, land use, human activities etc.), it is expected that not all traits (or trait clusters) are going to be related to hydrologic behavior.”

“For example, polarized and segregated echo chambers are commonly observed on social media (Jamieson and Cappella 2008; Garrett 2009; Conover et al. 2011; Lee et al. 2014), possibly leading to radicalization (Wojcieszak 2010; Bright 2018).”